Role in Bosnia Could Be NATO’s Undoing : Peacekeeping: A multilateral force would avoid the peril of a U.S.-Russian confrontation.

As we debate the Clinton Administration’s proposal to send upward of 25,000 U.S. troops to help police a possible settlement to the Bosnian War, one very important condition seems to have been less examined than assumed: Why does such a force have to be an explicitly NATO force?

Anxiety has been expressed, justifiably, about the danger to U.S. personnel, who are liable to get caught in a nasty cross-fire sooner or later, and about the slippery timetables for withdrawal and the absence of clear objectives for a U.S. military mission. Less often raised is the possibility that the United States could become an unwilling accomplice in Croatian imperial designs. From the looks of Franjo Tudjman’s infamous map, sketched on a menu in London, of Bosnia 10 years hence, Croatia may seek to absorb whatever is left of Muslim domains. If the United States inserts its military authority where its political sway is limited, a commitment undertaken to save Bosnia from the Serbs could end up contributing to its being fed to the Croats.

These worries in effect define the risk of making a new peacemaking force explicitly a NATO force: the risk, simply put, that it will stumble, fall and even fail.

The Clinton Administration’s guiding assumption seems to be that, having seen the apparent salutatory effect of NATO bombing this past summer, policing a settlement in Bosnia will be relatively easy, and the political payoff both for NATO and for the President will be substantial. The Administration eagerly seeks a larger role for itself and for NATO. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry told Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post in late September that he wants a NATO force in Bosnia in order to rebuild NATO’s besmirched image. NATO cannot be “rebuilt,” he believes, without a strong, committed American force, and “the failure to do that would lead to a dramatic weakening and maybe even the dissolution of NATO.” This same point has since been repeated often by Administration spokesmen who have come before Congress.

But it is twice wrong. Not only is putting NATO on the ground in Bosnia a high-risk operation amid a house-of-cards peace diplomacy, it also misconstrues what NATO is and always was about.

NATO’s future depends on its capacity to retain a shield against the possible recrudescence of a Russian military threat, its ability to keep Germany politically integrated in Europe and its function in keeping the United States a European power to the general benefit of all concerned--nowadays not necessarily in that order. It does not depend on what happens in Bosnia and, despite a great deal of historically ignorant babble, it never has.

If the United States insists on valuing NATO’s future in Balkan coinage despite both history and common sense, it risks creating a self-fulfilling intellectual misdirection that demeans the importance of the alliance and may truly jeopardize its future. This is not a bed that, once we have made it, we will wish to lie in.

Additionally, under current plans, a NATO force must find a way to integrate a Russian contingent. The Russians, everybody agrees, are needed to calm down and watch over the Serbs. Perry and his Russian counterpart, Pavel Grachev, announced agreement in principle on the matter this past Friday at Ft. Riley, Kan. But working out the details hasn’t been simple, and there are still several left to go.

Even if all the details are worked out, we may be sorry for the success. If the locals start fighting again, U.S. and Russian peacekeepers could end up facing each other on opposite sides of a confused and deteriorating situation. We then will have re-created in microcosm something like the military situation in July, 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. U.S.-Russian relations are tender enough nowadays without creating a situation in which American and Russian soldiers might end up shooting at each other.

To put the matter perhaps more generously than circumstances suggest, the decision to make a Bosnian peace force explicitly a NATO force has not been fully thought through. If, despite the risks, there is to be an international force in Bosnia with U.S. participation, let it be an ad hoc concoction, an example of foreign policy by posse along the organizational lines of the Gulf War coalition. Then there would be much less a problem with integrating the Russians and no further burden to an already overloaded U.S.-Russian diplomatic agenda. More important, there would be no deepening of NATO’s stake in a marginal but still dangerous place.